Oxford delights: Jilly Cooper and Barbara Pym

Tags

19 magazine, Barbara Pym, Barbara Pym Society, Georgette Heyer, Harriet, Jane and Prudence, Jane Austen, Jilly Cooper, Lisa & Co, Nancy Mitford, Oxford, Petticoat magazine, Virago

What’s the connection between Jilly Cooper and Barbara Pym apart from them being quintessentially English and writing splendidly funny novels?

Jilly Cooper’s introduction to the 2007 Virago edition of Barbara Pym’s Jane and Prudence, first published in 1953, tells the story of how she borrowed the novel quite by chance from a library and fell in love with it. ‘I shamefully lied to the librarians that I had lost it, paying a 3s 6d fine … over the years, as Barbara Pym replaced Nancy Mitford, Georgette Heyer, even Jane Austen, as my most loved author, I devoured all her books, but Jane and Prudence remains my favourite.’

Jilly Cooper was therefore the perfect and altogether delightful guest at a magnificent tea in Oxford, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Barbara Pym Society, as part of the Society’s weekend conference featuring Jane and Prudence.  Some of those attending might never have read a Jilly Cooper novel; others like myself have delicious youthful memories of revelling in her stories serialised in magazines like 19 and Petticoat, some of which were subsequently expanded into short romantic novels named after their heroines.

It’s in Harriet, partly set in Oxford and published in 1976, that we get a rather endearing echo of a scene in Barbara Pym’s Jane and Prudence; in both novels young girls remark to each other that thirty sounds so old but forty must be worse… whereupon they brood silently upon this horror!

Jilly Cooper might be more famous now for her ‘bonkbuster’ novels, starting with Riders in 1985, but perhaps the older among us will always have an affectionate soft spot for the irresistible heroes and scatty/naughty/dreamy/kind-hearted/unselfconfident/innocent heroines of the early romantic novels Bella, Emily, Octavia, Prudence, Harriet, Imogen and her collection of short stories Lisa & Co, first published as Love and Other Heartaches. They offered the escapist, romantic, comfort-with-comedy reading we sometimes needed when growing up.

As Jilly Cooper wrote of her short stories in 1981 ‘I cannot pretend that these stories are literature. They are written purely to entertain… Their mood is rooted firmly in the sixties, where we all lived it up… when the young were still optimistic about marriage, and believed that God was in his Heaven if all was Mr Right with the world.’

Jilly Cooper met Barbara Pym just once – at the Hatchards Authors of the Year Party in 1979 – a wonderful memory she will always treasure. I know I will do the same after meeting Jilly Cooper.

I Remember it Well – no chance

Tags

forgetting, inspiration, Jilly Cooper

Your item will be delivered between 7am and 6pm, says the machine on the telephone. I have to stay at home all day waiting for the doorbell to ring. It’s an ideal opportunity to write a story.

I find myself tidying out the kitchen drawers instead.

Such is the contrariness of inspiration that it never strikes when you want it to, when you have a pen to hand or are sitting at your laptop and blessedly free from being interrupted. Instead it has a malicious habit of darting unexpectedly into your brain at the most inconvenient moment possible. An idea for a twist in a plot or another aspect of a character comes into your head while your nice neighbour is talking to you about the best time to cut the hedge. You try to pay attention but all the time your mind is drifting and you are worried that it’s showing on your face.

I once read – I hope I am not making this up – that Jilly Cooper used to rush into the ladies at parties to record funny scraps of conversation. That was in the bad old days before soft lavatory paper.

Provident writers carry a notebook around so that they can jot things down on the move – but you can guarantee that it’s when you forget to have it with you that a particularly splendid idea comes knocking.

Maybe the idea wasn’t so splendid after all. This is the only consolation on offer. For it’s not just the forgetting of the idea by the time you get home, but the dismal certainty that you’ll have forgotten you even had an idea in the first place.

Thank goodness for Barbara Pym

Tags

Alexander McCall Smith, Barbara Pym, Excellent Women, Jane Austen, Jilly Cooper, Mavis Cheek, Reading, Waterstones

‘The Jane Austen of our day’ wrote A L Rowse. ‘I could go on reading her for ever.’ Yes, I know the feeling.

2013 is a brilliant year for fans of Barbara Pym; her centenary is being celebrated, and there are some splendid new editions of her novels being promoted, with introductions by popular authors such as Alexander McCall Smith, Mavis Cheek and Jilly Cooper. I found a table full of them in our local Waterstones, with a tempting offer for June…as Mavis Cheek writes, ‘Re-reading the entire canon, ten novels in all, has been pure bliss.’

It’s surprising (and reassuring) that Barbara Pym is so much admired by men, for much of the subtle comedy in her novels revolves around their not always endearing weaknesses and foibles. Do they recognise themselves and feel grateful that alongside the sharpness of wit there is tenderness and forgiveness to be found among the excellent women who pepper the novels?

Barbara Pym’s world is full of people like ourselves. Such a relief. No dungeons, designer living, desperate villains. But anyone who dismisses her as niminy-piminy has made a mistake. She’s never going to be up for the bad sex scene award, but passion of all kinds is there and not only among the young: self-deception, infidelity, unrequited devotion, romantic yearnings, cruel disappointment, misguided infatuation and homosexual love.

So as with Jane Austen, the novels may appear to be about the small doings of ordinary people, but they are lifted up into great and lasting literature by Barbara Pym’s extraordinary ear for the hidden tragedies as well as the small poignancies and comedies of our common experience. Such riches!

There’s a Barbara Pym Society centenary conference ‘Remembering Barbara’ at Oxford on August 30-September 1. It sounds wonderful. More details at http://www.barbara-pym.org